Photography as art

Samuel Bourne wrote about the status of the photographic image in India, where he thought it was held in greater artistic regard, compared to its bare scientific status in Europe at the time. This may have encouraged him to make his own photographs aspire to a higher condition of fine art, rather than merely documentation. In images he made of structures like the Moti Masjid (the Pearl Mosque, situated within Delhi’s Red Fort), patterns and echoing forms are emphasized —allowing viewers to imagine themselves in the complex itself, rather than observing it from outside.

After visiting an art exhibition held in Lahore in 1864, he wrote: ‘Unlike the treatment which photography received last year at the hands of the Commissioners in London it is here classified as one of the fine arts. Are we then more enlightened, or simply more just and unprejudiced in this land of rising British enterprise than the would-be patrons of art in professedly free but somewhat clique-ridden England?’

Taming the Colony

Compared to the majestic older buildings and structures from the subcontinent, such as the Fatehpur Sikri or the Taj Mahal, Bourne found the new colonial architectural style employed by the British, especially in Calcutta, to be severely wanting, describing the latter city to be ‘a place totally devoid of architectural beauty’. He preferred, instead, some of the more primal scenes that allowed him to contrast the wilderness of untamed nature to the ordered landscapes and gardens being built by the British.

On the other hand, he registered the lasting influence of Delhi’s buildings, even though the city had achieved notoriety for the events of 1857, writing, ‘Delhi can’t fail to be of interest to the photographer: the ‘Cashmere Gate’, the fort, and other noted places must be taken, while its mosques and similar buildings will be photographed for their own merits.’ Even though he was genuinely interested in photographing the structures and sites of Delhi, as commentators have noted, Bourne was also conscious of the British public’s demand for images from the site of the infamous revolt of 1857.

Containing the Picturesque

While the aesthetic of the picturesque, to which Bourne was committed, required sublime landscapes to fit perfectly within the frame of the camera’s field of view, this was often a difficult task on Indian ground. Rivers, glaciers, peaks of mountains and valleys frequently dispelled any attempt to capture them through a singular position or view. ‘Yet’, as Sampson writes, ‘this only challenged him to produce more than one view of a given area, often with the most subtle variations and in two or three different formats, by which he was able to expand the possibilities for comprehending the unwieldy and very often un-picturesque topography encountered on his treks.’

Labour and the early photograph

Unlike in our time, when it is sufficient to simply aim our cameras at a landscape and shoot its image, photography entailed a vast amount of labour-support in Bourne’s days. Vidya Dehejia writes, 'Samuel Bourne records that thirty porters accompanied him on his travels in the Himalayas in order to carry his ten-foot-high tent; 650 glass plates; two cameras and several lenses; numerous bottles of chemical solutions for coating, sensitizing, developing, and fixing the glass plates; funnels, pails, and baths in which the plates had to be immersed; and of course, his personal baggage.’ According to another historian, Bourne was an ‘obsessive, hard-driving, and sometimes abusive sahib’, who would resort to any means to make his porters obey his bidding and fulfil his objectives.

Elsewhere, he did photograph the voluminous, though anonymous, labour that went into sustaining the economy of the Empire, with photographs of people working at plantations, mills or docks and ports across the subcontinent. These tend to ‘deny the native worker any real identity. They are present only insofar as they have been assimilated by Bourne into his overall compositions, thus symbolically reiterating their generally anonymous compliance with the demands of the Raj.’